Giants of the post-Steroid Age: Less power? More pitching? What a perfect fit

* Baggs’ viewon the Giants’ trade discussions/possibilities: Yep, the brass’ conclusions about Nate Schierholtz and Travis Ishikawa have to a considreable factor in any potential deal.

-NOTE: I just wrote up this entire item and 90% of it got eaten up by the Web monster. So I’m re-doing it from scratch very quickly, not nearly as comprehensively, and it just doesn’t matter, anyway. Blecch.

-I don’t think the Giants did this on purpose.

If they had the foresight to build their team entirely on the specifications of a sport that used to have a massive injection of chemistry, but no longer does, and now features winning teams that don’t bang the ball over fences at regular intervals…

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Well, then the Giants are smarter than I’ve ever given them credit for.

I think it happened coincidentally–they coincidentally lost the King of the Steroid Age, lost their offensive mojo, are only gradually getting it back, but baseball in its entirely has lost its HR power at an even quicker rate.

Thanks to the de-juicing.

I’ve said in the past that I thought the Giants had to become a top-15 offense in order to be a serious postseason threat, and they’re not there yet, even now.

They’re currently 18th in the majors in runs scored, but they’re getting there.

And maybe that top-15-offense thing is out-dated thinking, in the post-Steroid Age.

Maybe just a blip-up (for the Giants, it’s a major blip-up on the on-base percentage. from .309, dead last, in 2009 and .326, which is NL average this year) does a huge leap if it’s accompanied with standard good Giants pitching.

Which is exactly what we’re seeing this season, so far.

After last night’s victory in Arizona, the Giants are 54-43, three games behind the Padres in the division, leading the NL Wild-Card race, and have a +76 run-differential, third-best in the NL.

They’re not a great offense. But they’re possibly/probably good enough–even if they don’t make a trade for that long-lost “big bat.” Really, they might be just good enough.

Home runs are way down from the early-2000s. Runs are down across the board. It’s largely about pitching, speed and defense, and the Giants have two of those things. (Not much speed, though.)

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* The Giants are averaging 4.4 runs per game, which, if they keep to this pace, would result in 713 runs scored this season.

That’s not a huge, Yankees-level total, but 713 would be the Giants’ highest run total since 2006, when they scored 746.

* The Giants have a team ERA of 3.39, which, if sustained, would be the franchise’s lowest ERA since the 1989 staff clocked in at 3.30.

-NL 2010 pitching averages: 4.10 ERA, .260 batting average against.

Giants 2010 pitching: 3.39 ERA, .239 BAA.

These are not huge contrasts from the Giants’ stats last year, when they scored 4.01 runs per game and had a 3.38 team ERA.

And the offense isn’t tremendously better than in 2008, when the second-worst run-scoring team could do nothing to cover up a thin pitching staff.

But an increase of .4 runs pre game is pretty good–and definitely good enough to make a difference when the pitching is good and the rest of the league is scoring less, especially over four- or five-year span.

Again, I don’t think the Giants did this intentionally. They’re still lusting for an additional power bat or two, and they’ve found one this year in Buster Posey, obviously.

Still, even if they don’t get that bat or two, it has worked out nicely for them, if it can be sustained.

(Of course, before the season, I noted that it would be possible that pitching and defense take on much larger significance this year, then pointed to Seattle as a team that could prosper. Nice.

(Big free-agent signee Chone Figgins was too busy fighting his manager last night to do any actual speed-defense helping.)

The Giants’ pitching is better than ever. Their defense doesn’t make titantic screw-ups on a regular basis and is, in general, very solid.

They don’t need to score 5 runs a game and blast a 1.3 homers a game if they do those things. They only need to be who they are, which is quite a bit different than the recent past.

Tim Kawakami

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Quite a change from his Rios for Lincecum/must have power/batting mindset…not much credit if any at all to Giants who perhaps were building team to suit ballpark…pitching, defense and enough but improving hitting. TK likes to research to justify a position but would like to see his honest research on his own positions and writings vis-a-vis pro power and batting over pitching, in a pitcher’s park no less.

BayLife5518

Paul,

Building a team to a ball park is insane unless it’s your pitching staff. You do play 1/2 the games on the road. To assume this team doesn’t need a power bat is a little silly also, they need another hitter no doubt.

Oranje

BayLife – I generally agree with you, however I’m not willing to trade Sanchez for a bat unless a guy like Ryan Braun is part of the deal. Not sure what else it would take, but I’m not in to trade a guy like Sanchez unless it’s for guys like Braun or Ramirez (Fla). Werth? Not so sure. DeJesus (prior to the injury) no way.

skhyatt

True, another bat would be great. But that other bat could be sitting right on their roster if he would start hitting like last year. C’mon Panda, quit swinging at balls up by your eyes and start hitting like we know you can!

paul

Baylife: Giants have apparently built pitching staff to ballpark (half the schedule is a lot) and are apparently not going to overpay for a power hitter which they and many teams need. Made no assumption they didn’t need power hitter.

MK1

The de-juicing? Do you mean, “across the board?” Because last I looked, no one was on track for even 50 HRs (let alone 60 or 70).

So, does this mean a certain Cardinal 1st Baseman was on the juice before this season? Tim, is that what you’re saying?

Careful there, big boy…

Lance Newberry

The Bonds era Giants were as juiced a team as any in the league; it wasn’t just Barry who was “pumped up”, it worked real well for a long time and Sabean & Magowan’s hands are just as dirty in that time as anyone else’s, because they knew exactly what was going on.

And it was the steroid age that made Sabean’s love & strategy of almost total reliance on veteran’s work.

He has always tried to fashion the team to the ballpark by bringing in one veteran line-drive, gap-to-gap hitter after another, like Edgardo Alfonso & Peirzinski (maybe those two didn’t get the memo about enjoying some juice) but now the whole concept is falling apart, with guys like Freddie Sanchez suddenly not improving dramatically as he slides deeper into his 30′s or Renteria simply being done instead of holding at a level or reviving his impact despite his advanced age. If Sabean is going to keep working he’s going to have to learn to love 20somethings.

As for building the pitching staff, once he was told to stop giving away his draft choices Sabean made a couple of good but pretty easy choices on Cain & Lincecum, but I wouldn’t give him that much credit for “building” this staff. Just look at the way Jonathan Sanchez has been jerked around by the organization through the years, and how long it’s taken him to get where he is now despite the electric stuff he’s always had.

If Sabean’s organization had really been focused on truly “building” anything these past few years then Sanchez would have been handled much differently and could well be twice the pitcher he is now. When a team isn’t even teaching it’s young pitchers how to hold runners on 1st then that organization can’t be given too much credit for anything else.

Ultimately I would imagine that Sabean is secretly in just about the same place as all the other management/owners in the league on the steroid issue; they’re BUMMED they’ve been discovered. No matter what they say to the public.

Fans love dramatic statistics, they love heady records being chased & broken and mainly they LOVE the long ball. It’s the long ball and everything that comes with it that sells all the fancy luxury boxes and ultra-expensive box seats in all the new stadiums. The Giants are 11 games over .500 right now and it’s cheaper by far than ever before to get into the park, yet large sections are empty every game without Barry & his boys pumping balls over the fence at record pace.

I really believe that in the dark corners of everyone’s perspective, from the fans to the players to the owners and certainly from the agents, that most are secretly happier with juicing happening, while the official line says it isn’t.

“Do it and just tell me you’re not.”

It’s not completely gone now, and it WILL come back big, because the BIG money is in the juice.

chadbrochill

Thank you for that comment that was just about as long as the article i just read…

sarchasmic

OOC, how much of this improvement can be attributed to Posey’s presence?

Jacob Wang

I read a MSNBC.com story that said league-wide offensive averages are where they were in 1992 (when there were only 26 MLB teams) & ’93 (when [South] Florida & Colorado joined the NL).

http://www.robertphoenix.com dominmatrix

Nice one Lance. Total agreement. As far as Tim K goes:

” just wrote up this entire item and 90% of it got eaten up by the Web monster. So I’m re-doing it from scratch very quickly, not nearly as comprehensively, and it just doesn’t matter, anyway. Blecch.”

Write in RTF first Tim, then cut and paste onto your SJ Merc text editor. Once you lose a good column or even a tepid one, it’s one too many.

Steve

The most overblown and ridiculously over-hyped story/subject in sports history has been the so-called “Steroids Era” in baseball. I agree that steroids can enhance a players performance in other sports, but in baseball? The answer is simply NO.

If you’re exceptionally big and strong and play in the NBA, could your career be enhanced? Well, Shaq can’t shoot, nor can he do any one thing (ie pass, dribble, run the floor) THAT much better than anyone else in the NBA, but because of his size and strength he’ll one day be in the HOF.

The NFL is ALL about being big, being physical, being very strong. Steroids and the NFL go hand-and-hand for blatantly obvious reasons.

Joe Thornton is very good at passing the puck to his teammates, but otherwise I can’t figure why he’s supposed to be that good? Hmmm, big and strong? Yep, the NHL is about players on ice skates, but if you’re not physically strong you probably won’t last very long, let alone make much of an impact. Hockey is a sport where only the strong survive.

And finally there’s baseball. The ONE sport SO associated with the word “steroids”. Why?

Do you need to be exceptionally strong and muscular to play pro baseball? Omar Vizquel says absolutely not. To lead the league in hitting? The Giants very own Freddie Sanchez says no way. To hit lots and lots and lots of home runs? Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were both 5’10 and 185 lbs and they combined to hit just less than 1400 home runs. Here’s the all-time list of home run leaders http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/HR_career.shtml that prove size and strength aren’t a prerequisite for hitting hrs. Remember how small and skinny George Foster was? Compare his lifetime totals to “man-mountain” Frank Howard. Not much difference.

Bobby Estallea (sp?) had muscles on top of muscles. He looked like the coverboy for Body Builder, USA. He also played at Coors Field for a chunk of his career. Didn’t matter. He never was very good, nor hit many home runs.

Hitting home runs has never been about “big and strong”. It’s the intricasies of your swing. Are you consistently hitting the ball with backspin? Do you have an uppercut to your swing? Do you consistently “square-up” the baseball? Obviously, the better hitters hit the ball harder more often than not.

Baseball, to take the “size and strength” importance even further, is unique in that any player, of any size, can play any position on the field and excell to potential all star play. In contrast, what would happen if you tried to make a PG a center? Or a QB an offensive lineman? Yes, steroids increases your muscle mass and overall strength, but where does it say, in the history of the game, that size and strength is important in the game of baseball? Barry Bonds?

In 2001 Luis Gonzalez hit 57 hrs, Rich Aurilia hit 38, and the “evil steroid-user” hit 73. Wow, how ’bout them steroids! But wait. ALL the years BEFORE and AFTER 2001, these players hit what was for them a “normal” number of hrs. Gonzalez in the 20′s, Aurilia in the 20′s or less, and Bonds in the 40′s. True, the only year that Bonds hit more than 49 hrs in his career was 2001. So if steroids were the reason that their numbers flew through the roof in ’01, why did each player drop so noticeably the following season(s)? Afterall, 2002 wasn’t when the steroid spotlight suddenly became brighter and hotter than the sun.

Bonds became public enemy #1 because his hr totals were growing and approaching the legends of the game. And also because he was simply disliked as a person except by Giants fans. What better way to discredit his accomplishments than by making steroids the Clark Kent-Superman baseball drug du jour? Yes, gawd damit, steriods is the reason Bonds is so good. And hits so many hrs. Even though in the ’90s when Bonds was a young skinny kid he had multiple seasons of 40+ hrs. And even though Bonds’ hrs were usually well over the fence/wall, I guess if you’re hitting hrs 10 rows deep without the juice compared to 20 rows deep on the juice your career ending hr numbers are artificially inflated because………?

They said, sure, Bonds, except for 2001, consistently hit the same number of hrs, within a reasonable range, his entire career. But, the reason that Bonds’ numbers are tainted is because he performed at such a high level for so long, and until an age where “normal” athletes are no longer capable of putting up superstar-like numbers. But isn’t that what seperates the truly great players in sports? How could Nolan Ryan be striking out 200+ hitters a season and throwing no-hitters into his mid-40s? Was HE on steroids as well, or was it because he, like Bonds, was freakishly-great. SO great that no one will ever be better.

The numbers are all there. And they just don’t add up. Or do they? LOTS of good pitching these days, but how good was the pitching from the late ’90s to mid ’00s? Maybe that was the “Hitter’s Era”? Naw, “Steroid Era” is more “juicey”, no pun intended. But in a sport where Andres Torres can hit tape measure hrs (see vs Strasburgh and AZ), how important IS size and strength? In a sport where Tiny Tim can win two consecutive CY Youngs, how important IS size and strength? And if steroids are all about size and strength, how exactly do they change the game of baseball? Just saying.

Todd

Say what you will about sabean (trust me, I think and say a fair amount of negative stuff), but you gotta give the guy credit on keeping Bumgardner over Alderson (recently demoted to triple A w the Pirates) in the Sanchez trade. Maddison is looking like a LEGIT starter and Freddy Sanchez, who likely won’t ever be an impact bat, is a gold glove caliber second basemen. Without Bum can you imagine where this season is?

bellevuemike

Mark McGwire was both the father of, poster boy for, and the undisputed “king of the steroid age”.

Bonds was merely its most popular prince.

Leonard Bonilla

The Giants have been screwing around with Sandoval since spring training. First it was the weight thing then his eye sight, now its his front leg movement (stride).The kid was doing fine before they discovered his astigmatisim. He had adjusted to that in his youth why did they need to fix what wasn’t broken. On his weight, yes some diet control is a good thing but they overcompensated (as usaul) and took his focus off base ball. When you take the fun out of base ball the player under produces. The Giants have taken the pleasure out of his game. You see the results. He had the same stride last year and was doing very well thank you. He was swinging at everything last season and doing very well thank you. Now you want “plate discipline” from him. Why? He was doing very well last season without it thank you. The Giants staff screwed up Sandoval, they need to take responsibility for his conditon now.

The one thing Sandoval needs to do is stop swinging at the high fast ball. That is the one pitch they have been getting him out with.

http://www.whenthegiantscometotown.blogspot.com DrBGiantsfan

Steve,

I’m not going to dismiss the impact of steroids or the lack of them on baseball, but there are clearly other forces at work here.

For one thing, steroid use was certainly as rampant among pitchers as among hitters, so the two should have come close to cancelling each other out.

The point about Aaron and Mays, neither of whom were particularly large men, is a great one.

Is it possible that part of the decline in offense that we are seeing is due to pitchers having discovered some new weapons? What impact has the widespread use of the cutter had? I mean, Mariano Rivera has built a HOF career on just that one pitch. What impact has it had on the scores of pitchers who have added it to an arsenal of other pitches? There are now multiple variations of the changeup including hybrids between splitters and changeups. There are knuckle-curves and spike curves. There are sliders, curves and slurves. I think pitchers just have a wider array of pitches that they throw well which has at least temporarily swung the balance of power toward pitching.